Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus (8 page)

“There’s more.” Alaric’s interjection was soft enough that I almost missed it.

Good thing I have good ears. “What do you mean, there’s more?”

“I mean…do you keep up with the site at all? The articles, I mean, not the op-ed columns or the updates from the Masons.”

“Not as much as I should,” I admitted. “Running a lab is a full-time job, even when you can do it legitimately. Under these conditions, it’s a full-time job for three people, and there’s only one of me. My reading for pleasure has sort of fallen by the wayside.”

“Okay. I wrote an article a few months ago that I really think you should read. Send me a currently valid e-mail address, and I’ll send it over to you.” Alaric sounded hesitant—more hesitant than normal. “It’ll explain a lot about the Fox.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I show you a picture?”

“Sure,” said Maggie. “Send it to my submissions account. We both have access.”

“On it.” Cradling the phone between my cheek and shoulder again, I pulled up the video of our mystery guest—who was growing less mysterious by the second—and clipped a single frame that showed her face in cool, silent repose. The lighting was good, highlighting the pallor of her skin and the purple shadows under her eyes. I attached it to an e-mail, sent it off, and waited. The connection was good. I didn’t have to wait for long.

“Mother of God,” said Maggie.

Alaric, who had spent more time in my lab than she had and knew exactly where that room was in the facility, was less restrained. “Dr. Abbey, what the fuck is the Fox doing in your observation room?”

“So you’re both identifying her as the woman from the Monkey’s compound?” I asked. “Please be clear in your answers. I need to be sure.”

“If it’s not her, she has a twin sister,” said Maggie. “That’s not okay.”

“It’s her,” said Alaric.

“Okay. That’s what I needed to confirm.”

“Dr. Abbey, I don’t think you understand.” Alaric was sounding more alarmed by the minute. “She’s a killer. That’s what she does. It’s what she
lives
for. She may have been upset when the Cat broke the rules, but that wasn’t going to stop her from putting a bullet in anyone who got in her way. You need to get her out of there. You’re not safe while she’s with you.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. In the meantime, Alaric, send that article over; I need all the help I can get in dealing with this situation, so if you’ve got something you think will help, I want it. Both of you, congratulations again on your wedding—I hope you’ll be very happy together. Give everyone my best, and don’t call back.” I hung up without saying good-bye. Farewells weren’t really my style, and hadn’t been since my husband died. Maybe it was a silly superstition, but I live in a world where the dead walk: I can be superstitious if I want to.

Alaric’s e-mail had already arrived, shunted though a dozen layers of increasingly sophisticated software to reach my inbox, where it waited for me to open it. I clicked. I opened. I read. And somewhere in the middle of his report, titled “Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System,” I began to cry. Thankfully, there was no one in the room with me but Joe, and Joe was loyal. Joe would never tell.

“Is she awake?”

“You asked us to notify you as soon as she woke up. I have not notified you. I value my position here in this lab, rather than outside in the wilds with no weapons and no references to show the next evil lab that I want to work for. Ergo, she has not woken up.” Jill didn’t look away from her computer as she spoke. Apparently, even being her boss didn’t put me above blood test results in her estimation. That was actually heartening. I signed her paychecks, but science was her real employer. That was exactly as things were meant to be.

“The lab isn’t evil, it’s ethically challenged,” I said. “We do good things.”

“I bet Frankenstein told himself the same thing,” said Jill, still typing. “She’s asleep, but she’s not
deeply
asleep. You could probably wake her up, if you wanted to go another five rounds with Sleeping Beauty: the horror movie edition.”

“Were you always this rude and disrespectful?” I asked.

“Not until my boss told me that talking back would help me on my annual reviews,” said Jill. She finally turned to look at me. “Do you want me to call Tom to come and play backup? He’s just down in his lab, playing with cannabis. You know, like he does every day.”

“Yes, but this time he’s doing it because I asked him to,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I don’t think she’s here to hurt me. I think she’s genuinely here because she needs help, and because the last person she trusted to help her used her instead. Used her hard, and put her away broken.”

“We’re not the Island of Misfit Toys,” protested Jill. “We can’t be responsible for every broken doll you come across.”

“Why not?” I asked, amiably enough. “I decided to be responsible for you.”

Jill didn’t have an answer for that, and so I turned away and walked out of the room, heading the few feet down the hall to the observation room where our mystery woman—who was becoming less mysterious with every moment that passed, even if she was becoming somewhat sadder at the same time—was waiting for me.

She didn’t stir as I opened the door and stepped inside. I shut the door behind me, walking calmly to the seat I’d been occupying earlier. Routine was important when dealing with people who had every reason to be suspicious of you: It both made you predictable, which could be comforting, and it lulled them into a false sense of security. It was amazing how many people took “doesn’t deviate” to mean “
can’t
deviate.” If I could build that assumption in her mind, however subtly, I would put myself in a much better position.

“Elaine,” I said. “Wake up. I need to talk to you.”

The woman on the cot flinched. That was all I needed to know that she was awake, and more importantly, that I was right. She was the Monkey’s faithful killer, the one he called “the Fox,” but before that, she had been a schoolteacher from Seattle named Elaine Oldenburg.

“I could sell your location to a lot of people. There are still warrants out for your arrest, thanks to the things that happened at your old school. None of the parents of the surviving students want to press charges, but you know how parents are. They’re always looking for someone to blame. The way you disappeared sure did make you a person of interest.” I leaned back in my seat. “I
could
sell your location, and I’m not. That should be enough to earn me a little conversation, don’t you think? Stop pretending to sleep, and talk to me.”

“Nothing here is worth saying,” said the woman. Her voice was very small, and it lacked the lilting edge that it had held before: Now it was filled with a deep resignation, like this was the ending that she had always expected but had somehow been holding out hope would be avoided. “I was, I wasn’t, and now you’re telling me that I am again. It’s not fair. When I took the cup and sword, he promised me I’d never have to be again. That was the deal. Give myself over to service, and never be anyone I didn’t want to be ever again, no matter what happened, forever and ever, amen. That was the
deal
.” Her voice took on a plaintive edge that cut through the air like the whine of a bone saw slicing through flesh. “He wasn’t supposed to leave me.”

“Do you mean the Monkey?” I asked, trying to keep my own voice as neutral as possible. All those drugs that she was on…some of them could be used to induce a dissociative state. If Elaine had gone to him because she had heard that he could supply her with drugs that would do that, then his death could have seemed like the greatest betrayal of all. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if you know this, but the Monkey is dead. He died in Seattle.”

“I know he’s dead.” Now she sounded almost dismissive. I was giving her old information, and she didn’t have time for that. “I saw him die. I didn’t shoot him, if that’s what you’re asking. I could have done it, but I didn’t do it. I wasn’t mad at him. Everyone is just as they’re made, that’s all, and he made himself into what he was one inch at a time.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.

“I mean he made me with drugs and promises, and he made himself with drugs and surgery and blood and women who would do whatever he wanted them to do. His only mistake was the Cat. She was a hunter. He didn’t want hunters. He wanted killers. They’re not the same thing, you know.” She smiled beatifically, her eyes still closed. “They never have been.”

“He died two years ago,” I said. “A lot of people thought that you had died, too. How did you not run out of drugs until now?” Because that should have happened a long time ago. There was no way she could have been maintaining the levels of chemical modification that Jill had found in her bloodstream. Some of those compounds had short shelf lives; they broke down too quickly for her to have been traveling with any kind of a supply. Others were just hard to make, and dangerous to carry. The only way our girl had made it through the past two years was by finding another supplier—and that didn’t fill in any of the gaps that were starting to open around her. She wasn’t telling her story. The story I’d been able to uncover had some holes.

“The Monkey always used to say, ‘If something happens to me, go here,’” she said, and finally turned her head toward me, opening her eyes. They were fathomless and cold. I could have fallen forever into those eyes. “He gave me names. Addresses. Safe houses I could run to. But some of them weren’t as safe as others. Some of them had problems that had to be solved with fire, and with screaming.” She shrugged a little. “It’s a living.”

“So these safe houses, they gave you the drugs that you needed? How did they know what you needed?”

“Monkey told them. He always knew he might die someday. Dying someday came with the job, like getting cavities comes with eating too much sugar, or breaking toes comes with dancing ballet.” She sounded so calm, like she wasn’t talking about her own life. “So he gave the safe houses lists of what I was on, and told them that they could have me if they’d keep me nice and gone. I trusted him. I believed he wouldn’t give me to bad people.”

“Did he give you a copy of that list?”

Now she sighed, shaking her head. “He said knowing what I needed would just make me unhappy, because then I’d be able to see just how broken I really was. I guess he was trying to protect me again. He loved me best, you know. Out of all his girls, he loved me best.”

“Is that so?” I asked, as neutrally as I could. I didn’t recognize what she was describing as love, but I had been around long enough to understand that sometimes love doesn’t look like anything you would expect. Sometimes love is a spider hiding in the corner of the room, dark and brooding and terrible to anyone who doesn’t experience love in the exact same way. That’s what makes love so dangerous, and so impossible to destroy. You can’t kill what you can’t see.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I wasn’t the first, but I was the best, and all I had to do was spend most of my time not being anyone at all. That was what I wanted most, and he gave it to me. He let me not be anyone at all.” Her face fell. “I’m becoming someone again. I don’t like it.”

It was hard not to get frustrated with her. It was half like talking to a child and half like talking to one of the fragile attempts at artificial intelligence that people like Tessa periodically pushed out onto the greater Internet, hoping that the sheer flow of data would transform them from particularly well-designed Chinese rooms into actual people. But getting mad at those programs didn’t make them function any better, and neither would getting mad at her. “Why don’t you like it? You were a person before the Monkey got his hands on you.”

“I was a
bad
person,” said the woman. I couldn’t decide what to call her. She wasn’t the Fox anymore—and it wasn’t like I would have ever used such a stupid name for a flesh-and-blood person; even at my most understanding, I have my limits—but she hadn’t turned back into Elaine yet. Assuming she ever could. Some of those drugs had permanent, long-term effects, and those were just the compounds I had heard of before. The experimental cannabinoids, who knew? “I was supposed to keep the children safe, and I didn’t. Why would I want to be her ever again? All she was good for was losing. The Monkey made me stronger. The Monkey took all that pain away, and he gave me laughter and happiness instead. I miss him.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to tell her that she’d been used by a man who got her addicted to synthetic narcotics and then given her to his friends when he died. But none of that would have done any good. Love is a spider, and spiders weave webs. “I’m sorry for your loss, but look. I need to know how you found us. I need to know what you’re doing here. I need to know what you
want
, aside from the drugs.”

“Can you give me drugs?” She pushed herself up onto her elbows, showing more animation than she previously had. “I need my pills. I don’t like feeling this way.”

“What way?”

“Any way.” She shook her head fiercely. “I don’t like
feeling
. Everything is supposed to be calm and smooth and fun, and yeah, sometimes it’s all irrationally violent, but that’s okay, because the drugs take the scary out of it. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be the one who had to survive and keep on going. Can you make it go away?”

“None of us asked to be the ones who survived; we just got lucky.” Or unlucky, depending on how you wanted to look at it. “Yes, we can provide you with a certain amount of pharmaceutical support. How much we provide will depend on what you can tell me.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want,” said the woman. Her voice was eager, almost pleading. “I’ll kill anyone, or do anything, or whatever. Just please, please, give me the pills.”

“How did you find us?”

She pulled back slightly, eyes darting to the side. “I asked people where I could go for drugs. They said to come here. They said this was the place to go.”

“Who did you ask? Who told you that this was the place to go?”

“People. Please.” She looked at me pleadingly. “Please, just give me the drugs. I don’t have that much time. Please, you have to help me. They promised you could help me.”